DWP spent £5m on ID database it never built

The Department for Work and Pensions spent over £5m on an Identity Cards database so poorly conceived that it was never built.

The department spent three futile years designing the database after the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) commissioned it 2007. It was to be one of two key ID databases and would form the backbone of a system to share personal data about British citizens across the whole of government. But poor planning, inter-departmental disagreements and data security risks prevented it from being developed.

The DWP refused to reveal how much it had spent designing the aborted ID system, called CISx. The DWP press office said it would only answer questions if forced to do so by a Freedom of Information Request. The answers Computer Weekly obtained under FOI revealed how much money the government wasted on the IPS/DWP plan before it officially pulled the plug last summer.

"The cost of establishing the CISx service and developing the technical changes to CIS to enable data sharing and the storage of additional data items totalled £5,200,000," a DWP spokesman wrote in an FOI report.

The plan involved transforming the DWP's Customer Information System (CIS), which has 90m records of living and dead British citizens, into a biographic reference for government department wanting to check people's credentials and record more of their personal details.

The DWP spokesman said the department could still make use of some of CISx design work in its legacy CIS database, which is still used by more than 200,000 civil servants.

"Standards and policies that were developed have or will be used to support ongoing CIS activities," he said.

Ungovernable

He also gave an insight into the inter-departmental problems that led the ID CISx plan to flounder. The system was so ambitious that numerous government departments where required to govern and fund it, with the work being done by the DWP's Information Systems section. But their inability to co-operate caused the IPS to order the DWP plans be torn up in 2010.

The spokesman said some of those departments appointed as joint owners of the DWP CISx had contributed to its development costs.

"IPS and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) reimbursed DWP the cost of developing the original CISx service assets, apart from the development of a financial management tool for the use of CISx services by OGDs (other government departments), which was paid for by DWP...IPS also paid for the development of technical changes to CIS."

The DWP made no reference to HMRC, one of the other departments that had been appointed joint owners of CISx. Neither did it specify amounts paid by each department.

The DWP had tried to establish an innovative means of governing the development and operation of its cross-government system. Such a system had never been built before. The governance model was untried.

The DWP elected to act as though it were an IT services company. Other government departments in on the CISx plan would become commissioners. The governance model proved unworkable.

"CISx proposed a Commissioner/Provider model and shared governance arrangements, with users of CIS acting as Commissioners and the DWP acting as the Provider," said the DWP spokesman's email.

"The DWP has decided not to adopt this model to avoid overhead costs that would otherwise need to be borne by the Commissioners and because experience led the Department to conclude that the model did not provide significant benefits over existing governance arrangements," he added.

The DWP accepted the IPS' request for the CISx in 2007 after establishing loose agreement over the system of governance with IPS, HMRC and DVLA.